Well, Semper Fi and all that.
Until (unlikely as it is in the near future) I get to see the film again, I cheerfully happily and indeed eagerly admit the possibility this altogether sappy, cliché and rather manipulative storyline could have layers and layers of gooey goodness under it’s prettily-painted shell.
But I doubt it.
Not might. Will. “I’ll see to it.” I just linked to the trailer where he says it. And anyway, as liirogue says, he had agreed to spy on and betray the Na’vi before the legs thing even came up.
Or that regenerating a severed spine and restoring useful nerve function is fantastically expensive. Look at it this way: how much does it cost for the Marines to produce one seasoned veteran? I would guess millions when you factor in overhead like the ratio of washouts and screwups, and the length of time it takes to go from maggot to veteran. Yet apparently it’s cheaper to discharge paraplegics from the Corps and recruit fresh meat than it is to repair a spine. Especially when you consider how damaging to Corps morale it must be to dump a fellow Marine on the garbage heap. In present day dollars, the procedure must cost eight or even nine figures.
Maybe unobtanium is spine glue.
Bryan, you’ve made so many misstatements about what is and is not in the movie, both in this thread and others, that I think we can assume your comments are based on misconceptions until you prove them otherwise. 
SWMBO and I went to see it in 3-D this weekend. The movie is awash with liberal “military and corporations are evil” bullshit, but the special effects more than overcome it.
And Sigourney Weaver at age 60 is still smokin’ hot!!
I finally saw it today in IMAX 3D.
The plot is a retread because it works. It’s a heartstring-tugger by its very nature. Yes, it’s been done to death, but it’s not a bad plot, and it was simply the framework for the visuals. Cameron wasn’t doing an original movie, he was doing an old movie in a better way.
The visuals were absolutely stunning. When I heard about the people who are depressed that they can’t go to Pandora, I laughed. I still laugh, but I understand where they’re coming from. The thing is, I’ve seen this kind of movie before. But it was always either animated or nestled deep in the Uncanny Valley (or else sidesteps it entirely, as in Pixar movies). This is the most successful attempt at getting directly through the Uncanny Valley that I’ve yet to see. It just looked real.
“Unobtanium” didn’t ruin the movie at all, and it kind of puzzles me that it has that power over folks. I just laughed at it, stuck it in the same mental category as “adamantium” and carried on enjoying the pretty pretty movie. It could have been called “dontnitpickium” and I would have let it go.
It’s definitely going to be this generation’s Star Wars, to repeat what was said a few pages back. It may be flawed, but so was SW, and it’s catching imaginations just like SW did. I daydreamed for years about flying in the Millennium Falcon or an X-Wing, and I guarantee you kids will be daydreaming for the next decade at least about going to Pandora.
You are posting an AWFUL lot (more than anyone else, it appears) in a thread about a movie that you say you don’t care for all that much.
Top four posters in this thread:
Bryan Ekers 81
mswas 69
Equipoise 51
Red Barchetta 40
Dammit, not even bronze…
I just saw the movie today for the first time. I really, really liked it.
Of course the plot was cartoonish. That’s because the movie is a cartoon. It’s a graphic science fiction novel in moving 3D. Of course the characters were archetypes - they were comic book characters. And I don’t say that in a bad way. This movie needs to be judged on its own merits, and not on the movie you wish it was, if in fact you didn’t like it.
The 3D had some issues. I noticed a pretty big reduction in contrast and brightness and color saturation compared to a good 2D film. If you didn’t see that, then perhaps it was my theater - we could only manage to see it in a cineplex, which are only average theaters.
But gripes aside, the 3D in this movie greatly enhanced it. That first shot inside the starship, where they are waking everyone up from their sleep, was the first time I thougth 3D had ever given me a new, important experience. I experienced what the inside of a 0g starship might look like in a way I just wouldn’t get from 2D. That’s worth giving up the brightness and contrast a tiny bit. So, a big thumbs up from me.
By the way, much of the show at CES this year was taken by 3D TV. Just about every manufacturer showed off a 3D set Reviews of the units on display were almost uniformly good, with some people absolutely raving about it. You’ll be buying them this year, and within 10 years I’m guessing 2D-only TVs will have gone the way of the dinosaur - at least in the larger models. They can still do great 2D if needed, but you’ll want the 3D capability. There will be some astonishing programming created in this format once all the creative people start working in 3D.
James Cameron may have succeeded in changing the way movies are made. He’s been working on this technology for a long, long time. He did a lot to help perfect it and figure out how to use it. I’m sure his teams pioneered a lot of new 3D rendering techniques and blazed out a trail of best practices for others to follow to do it right. That’s really the important accomplishment of this movie - It’s the first movie where the star was the 3D format itself. The comic book is just the best way to create a phenomenal alien world and then take the audience for a ride through it.
This movie would have been interesting even had their been no plot at all, and it was just presented like National Geographic’s Earth, only on an alien world.
As for the ‘unobtanium’ - I think that was Cameron’s way of giving the audience a wink, to let them know it’s okay to just suspend disbelief. Cameron was giving the audience enough credit to know they’d get the reference.
Wow Sam, good post!
Besides…what name would have worked? Something based on current scientific knowledge? It’d get nitpicked to death and would just break suspension of disbelief in a different group of people. Something technobabblish, like dilithium or adamantium? That might have worked better, but they’d probably need to give a bit more exposition as to why Earth wants it so bad. Calling it unobtanium is a nod to the audience, instant exposition (and is better than calling it ‘awesomium’), and is plausible, especially given the backstory (I point to the current use of ‘bug’ in programming terminology).
I’ve heard that the explosion in 3D hardware and programming is directly a result of Avatar. The industry has been buzzing about this movie for years. While the mainstream press was focusing on the, “Will it make back its investment?” angle, the more technical publications and journals were really digging into the technology.
Sony just announced the finalized Blu-ray specification for 3D. The industry is in hyperdrive on 3D right now. Several movies have had their budgets increased and their release dates pushed back so scenes can be reshot in 3D. And it’s all because of what people have learned from Cameron and have seen in clips from Avatar.
I also predict that after we see what lesser directors manage to do with 3D, people who think little of the film now will have a greater appreciation for the sheer artistry of the world Cameron created and how he presented it.
I honestly think this movie is a big deal. It’ll probably be remembered as the first ‘real’ 3D film - the one that made 3D part of the art form and not just a gimmick to shock the audience.
Just to repeat, unobtaniumis a real-world term used by engineers for a rare, costly material. It’s been used even in academic articles. There is nothing wrong , whatsoever, with its use in Avatar.
Yeah, actually there is. "Unobtanium is a term used for any generic impossible-to-find material. The joke is that if you actually find it, it’s not unobtanium, is it? There can be no real, specific material called ‘unobtanium’.
It’s sometimes used to refer to an as-yet uninvented technology. As in “all we really need is an unobtanium material with a tensile strength X times greater than steel, and the rest is easy.” But if something like carbon nanotubes are discovered and fit the bill, then they are not unobtanium.
I had the same experience, in the same kind of theater. A handful of times throughout the film I briefly took off the 3D glasses to check what it was like without them, and noticed definite improvements in all three of those areas. The dulling didn’t ruin my enjoyment of this amazing film, though, although it does make me want to go see it in 2D, as well as try to get into an IMAX showing.
I hadn’t thought of Avatar as a graphic novel, but now that you mention it – of course! Spot on.
Well, according to the Wiki article:
This would be very similar to its use in the film.Closer, for sure. But still - they called it unobtanium because they thought they could never get it. The unobtanium in the movie was actively being mined.
The analogous case would be for the engineers on the SR-71 to find that they were actually getting the Titanium to build it. At that point, it’s no longer unobtanium, even if it’s really expensive and eats up too much of the budget.